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BIFF review: Little World

By Mike Pearson For the Camera

Posted:
02/16/2013 06:11:27 AM MST

Updated:
02/16/2013 06:32:31 AM MST

Albert Casals is a paraplegic, but that doesn't hinder his explorations, including a visit to the Great Wall of China, in the documentary "Little World."
(Boulder International Film Festival/Courtesy photo)

"Little World" is one of those movies destined to be used as a motivational tool for years to come. It's all about the power of the human spirit to triumph over life's adversities.

And, no, it's not a sports story. This compelling documentary centers on Albert Casals, a cheeky 20-year-old from Barcelona who decides to travel from his home in Spain to the farthest point in the world. He'll do this without cash by using his perky personality and his wiles.

The hook? Albert is a paraplegic, the result of chemotherapy poisoning after contracting leukemia as a child. He's confined to a wheelchair -- except when he's crawling up the stairs at the Great Wall of China, frolicking in the Indonesian surf, rolling on the floor of his host's home in Syria or slithering to the top of a lighthouse in East Cape, New Zealand, 30,000 kilometers from Barcelona.

How Albert and girlfriend Anna manage this journey is all the more beguiling when you realize they filmed much of it themselves using handheld cameras. A professional film crew is there at the start and the finish, but the bulk of this film has a near-cinema verite feel as the traveler's document encounters with a broad swatch of humanity, from Rome to Istanbul to Australia.

It's not all on-the-fly footage. Director Marcel Barrena intersperses Casals family home movies of Albert as a child with interviews with Albert and Anna's parents and friends. Those interviews give the film a shadow story: What's it like to let go of someone you've spent your entire life trying to protect from the world? As brave as Albert is, his parents seem somehow braver.

Of course, Albert is the star here, and you've probably never met anyone like him. Lively, precocious with dyed blue hair, he articulates a philosophy of live for today without regrets for the past. Not once does he decry his life in a wheelchair, nor does he use it as an excuse not to do things. If he can't roll to a certain location, he'll hop out of the chair and crawl there. That spirit and a healthy sense of humor lets him charm everyone from truckers to border guards (except in Iran) to get where he wants to go.

You might be left with some nagging questions -- such as how he manages to get into so many countries without a visa -- and the precise nature of an illness that strikes him near the end of the trip and nearly kills him. Yet you brush those concerns aside as you marvel at this free spirit whose determination to view life as an opportunity and not a challenge makes the rest of us seem like, well, slackers.

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